Bold links are exteral to the site and will pull up a new tab/browser.
Links in the navigation bar on the left surrounded by [square brackets
...] with ellipsis (...) are folders and have more content in them.
Items that are the same page as what is displayed will not show a link.

This document prints without the navigation for convenience.
You will see the document's full URL at the bottom of the printout for reference.

If a page does not work properly, hit F5 to refresh. there may be an updated page available.

Overview

this set of calculators calculates the time required to complete a
download or upload given a specific upload or download bandwidth
(speed). it will give the answer in years, months, days, hours,
minutes,seconds, and milliseconds in 2 different formats. enjoy.

this page requires javascript to be enabled to do its work. sorry.

how much bandwidth should I buy?

a hard disk is slow. its average access time is measured in
milliseconds. at say, 7ms average access time, assuming 512 byte sector
size, 512*1/7e-3=73,142bytes/sec=71K/sec absolute worst case of only 1
write per access. NTFS groups sectors together, so usually you get about
13-18MB/sec and disks don't usually thrash that badly anyway.

with a windows application I wrote, createfile, I currently get
60/(1*60+12)/60*1000=0.01388GB/sec=13.888MB/sec with a pattern write on a
7200Rpm 2TB hard drive. my processor is a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 HT (1 core 2
thread, looks like 2 procs). that comes out to
0.013888*1e9*8*1.13=119,237,600bits/sec or about 119.2Mbps. newer pc's
have the same dilemma: hard disks go at a maximum of 18MB/sec.

this is the maximum speed at which downloads can be written to the
hard disk on my machine. what that means is, this is the upper limit
for bandwidth on my machine - it wouldn't make any sense to buy a higher
speed. an SSD on the other hand, might get better results.

Gotchas

Cable Internet is notorious for slow speeds during busy hours. If
lots of people are online on one particular group transmitter and using
it, it will bog down (actually, they have gotten better about this in my
area). I have seen times where it has gotten down to 25 bytes/second
on my 22Mbps line.

Downloading an "update" or patch to a program like Roxio Easy Media
Creator Suite 10 (a cd burning program) nowadays requires the fastest
broadband internet access you can get, because they are typically
800-900MB now. My Paint Shop Pro X2 update was 44MB. Sometimes, they
are not just patching one or two programs – they are replacing the whole
package. So brace yourself...

Until I can test on a faster machine, I believe "download speed" is
only a marketing ploy. On my very slow Pentium 4 HT 2.8GHz machine (1C, 2
thread) with mcafee (which like any antivirus the firewall acts as an
internet proxy and may slow the internet down and be the cause) I
consistently get the same download rate as my upload rate. I think the
reason why is that TCP/IP, on which nearly every protocol (including
HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS) is built ises a protocol that involes a
formof communication that requires a request and an acknowledgement.
this gets into latency (time delays) which slow down the connection and
other things. this is why you don't generally try to access servers
across the other side of the planet - it's the latency that gets
you,plus all those hops between routers and switches which add
additional delay. round trip, it all adds up to: SPEED! the inverse of a
round-trip time delay in milliseconds is basically speed. another way
you can measure your equivalent speed in Mbps is multiply the kBytes/sec
you get in the download manager of firefox (or your favorite download
maneger for *1* download only (don't download more than 1 thing, it will
mess up the numbers). multiply that number by 8 and divide by 1e6 using
ttcalc or your favorite calculator. that's kBytes/sec×1e3×8/1e6=Mbps.
that's assuming they are not using IEC units of course. if they are,
that would be kiBytes/sec×1024×8/1e6=Mbps. the 8 is for 8 bits in a byte
(they call it an octet in networking parlance), and the 1024=1KiB
whereas 1000=1KB. on my computer using comcast standard internet with
tv, I get 20Mbps/3Mbps according to speedtest.net however, I think
because of the round-trip request/ack I only get the upload speed which
is 3Mbps for my download speed. so they can advertise 20Mbps all they
want it's not doing me any good. If you are getting results to the
contrary on your fast computer, PLEASE tell me. I want to know. use the
Contact Me page.

canned file sizes and bandwidths/speeds calculator (easy)

broadband

calculate any bandwidth/speeds and file size

broadband - any rate

Size of file (integer, special format):
Example: numbers are integer64: integer64 is unsigned and case
insensitive. it ignores underscores(_) and any grouping character such
as comma if configured for such (currently configured for comma, so
numbers like 1,000,000 or 1,000:MiB are OK). it can be hexadecimal
(start with 0x), decimal (plain number or start with 0d), octal (start
with 0, 0q, 0o), binary (start with 0b), and can be appended with SI
units (:B :D :DB :H :HB :K :KB :M :MB :G :GB :T :TB :P :PB :E :EB :Z :ZB
:Y :YB) or computer units (:Ki :KiB :Mi :MiB :Gi :GiB :Ti :TiB :Pi :PiB
:Ei :EiB :Zi :ZiB :Yi :YiB) as a multiplier suffix. priority will be
given to longer suffixes in a stream of printable characters. (a 1:KiB
is 2^10=1024 bytes, whereas 1:KB is 1000 bytes, and 1:MB is 1000000
bytes whereas 1:MiB is 2^20=1024^2=10241048576 bytes). It ignores
garbage before and behind and also ignores _ inside numbers (perl format
for grouping).
for the unsigned functions, that includes + and -.

your rate: bps. (don't know? use SpeedTest.net)
Example: 10Mbps is written as as 10:Mb or 10,000:Kb or 10,000,000.
896Kbps is written as 896,000 or 896:Kb or 896:kb or 896k, 100Gb is
represented as 100:Gb or 100:G, 3.3Mbps is integerized and written as
3300:Kb, and a T1 line is 1.544Mbps is integerized and knocked down one
SI unit and specified as 1544:Kb

time required: 0 days 00:00:00.000

calculate dialup bandwidths/speeds and file size

Dialup

Equation for this form below:
overheadratio=10*(65536bytesperpacket+1024bytesoverhead)/65536.0bytesperpacket
hrs=(size×overhead/(bandwidthInBitsPerSecond/10bitsperbyte))/3600secondsinhour

Note: very few prople actually get 48k or 56k. usually it's 26.4Kbps/1.44Kbps. (SS7 doesn't allow more than 26400bps/14400bps)

Your download rate:Size of file:
Example: 8MB is written as as 8:MB or 8000:KB. 384KB is written as
384000 or 384:KB or 384:kb. 100GB is represented as 100:GB. computer
unis can also be used, like :KiB, :MiB, :GiB, :TiB, :PiB (a 1:KiB is
2^10=1024 bytes, whereas 1:KB is 1000 bytes, and 1:MB is 1000000 bytes
whereas 1:MiB is 2^20=1024^2=10241048576 bytes)